


like a break up except there's nothing to break

by chateauofmyheart



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: 80s queen, Character Study, Drinking, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Hot Space Era, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, Period-Typical Homophobia, brian-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 14:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17489834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chateauofmyheart/pseuds/chateauofmyheart
Summary: Brian's been thinking about alternate universes.ora vague look at the hot space era where everything hurts and no one's quite happy





	like a break up except there's nothing to break

**Author's Note:**

> the premise for this fic is not my idea: i read something years ago following these lines, and it's all blurry and vague but still enough that i can't take credit for it
> 
> anyways enjoy some bitter angst ft. facts i did not check and my chronic overuse of polysyndeton

Brian’s been thinking about alternate universes.

It’s never been his field of study, theoretical physics, but he’d fallen in love with the idea of a different world beyond his own as a child and it had never truly left him.

It feels like a whole different world now, with Freddie’s new look and everyone’s new anger. Brian’s still got bruises from the last time their fighting got physical, half-drunk on champagne and rage. They’ve all been drinking more, fighting more, screaming and throwing things and leaving more. 

He _hates_ it. Hates what they’re doing and what they’re playing.

Brian thinks about alternate universes and only when he’s alone, sitting on the edge of his empty bed in the dark, does he admit it’s because his own is too much to bear. Lately, the blissful clutches of sleep have been little more than light finger brushes to his body. There’s a burning in his chest that won’t go away. Chrissie is gone more often than not; they’re not seperated, not yet, but Brian knows what inevitability feels like.

Everyday he walks into the studio with the same sinking feeling one gets walking into a crowded room of strangers. Freddie and his shoulder devil arrive never before noon and and always smelling of something mind-altering. Seeing the others hurts more often than not, lately.

 

* * *

 

He thinks about different worlds until he starts to see them- or, more nearly, he sees himself; other Brians from other universes. They’re everywhere, like ghosts, invisible to everyone but him. His face, different and yet the same, reflected back like a dirty mirror. It’s all strangely foreign. _It’s true what they say about not recognizing your clone,_ he thinks, maybe a little hysterically. 

The Brians, the ghosts, stand along the hallways in his house, group around the matching sets of living room furniture, wander listlessly through the garden. They’re at the studio, too, watching from the sound booth and hovering around the instruments. Brian watches them and no one else does and he thinks he might be going mad.

So far he’s counted 1,034 alternate universes. He keeps them, tucked away in his pockets. Learns them.

In one universe, Brian never gets into music. That version of him sits at his dining room table with short, straightened hair and a PhD and watches him struggle to write lyrics with cold, indifferent eyes. That Brian looks like his father, and it’s an ugly reminder of the way he lost his father’s respect when he dropped out of college. A small, bitter part of Brian wishes he never had, and a larger part of him that despairs at the sheer unhappiness he feels in the studio almost wants to agree.

 

* * *

 

Some days, Brian’s not sure how much longer they’re going to last. Queen’s soaring in popularity, but it feels a bit like they’ve broken a wing somewhere along the way. Playing the guitar comes with a freefall feeling now.

No one can see his ghosts, the other Brians, and he watches as they shuffle out of the way as someone walks by in the tight studio corridors. They don’t move for him; he keeps making himself smaller as he moves around, turning and drawing up his shoulders for spectres who are little more than a figment of his imagination. No one sits with him and still he’s squeezed his body to one end of the studio couch, making room for ghosts.

 

* * *

 

In 352 universes, they never formed at all.

Brian thinks it’s quite impressive, really, how unlikely it was for Queen to come about, the odds of it; and yet it happened in so many worlds. It’s scary how much of a constant they are. He remembers when he thought they were a family of sorts, unbreakable in their youthful hubris, and wants to cry.

He argues with Freddie like he always has but now it’s ugly, teeth bared and insults barely veiled, if at all. It used to be how they made music, crashing together and building off each other like waves. Now they tear each other apart and Brian’s chest burns a bit more every time.

Freddie writes songs and Brian looks them over and there’s no space for him anymore. It’s all club music and disco. John thrives, of course he does, he loves disco and the bassline is the only interesting part to club music anyhow. Brian thinks Roger’s probably as miserable as he is, missing the good old days of rock ‘n roll. _But_ , he thinks, a little self-pitying, _at least there are drums in disco._

 

* * *

 

John comes into the studio with a new song. It takes Brian longer than it should realize it’s about him.

Out of those 682 universes where Queen exists, there are only three where they don’t meet John. In two of them, Queen doesn’t last through college. In one, they find a decent bassist and they don’t do half bad, but they never quite reach whatever it was they were aiming for. The Brian of that universe wears disappointment like an ill-fitting shirt and watches John whenever he plays. 

John is important. They wouldn’t have succeeded without him. Brian knows it and yet only a glance at the John-less Brian can remind him some days. John’s eyes are blank and he doesn’t say a word when Brian insists on doing a guitar solo in Back Chat like he doesn’t know what it means. 

Brian doesn’t know why he does it. Maybe it’s sheer bitterness, or some twisted form of revenge. The laughable irony of it all stings under his fingers as Freddie and John watch him, unimpressed, from the sound booth.

 

* * *

 

John seems like he doesn’t care, tells them as much one day when Freddie leaves early, flouncing off after a spat about what all their spats had been about lately; him, and the music. But Brian knows better, and he worries.

When John had first joined them, background paper in their new house, unnoticed and yet necessary to cover up the water stains and dents in their walls; Freddie had been the one to draw him out and paint him pretty with eyeliner and glamorous clothes, to encourage his writing and playing. Freddie had been his voice, to sing and speak to the press while he only let himself dance quietly onstage. John admires Freddie, different from the way the rest of them do. 

Brian can hear the compartments in his brain snap shut as Freddie slams the door, and worries for the day that disillusionment marrs John’s face. Disappointment, he knows, is a bitter flavor. 

 

* * *

 

In one universe, Brian gets into drugs. Pot and pills and the real, hard core stuff he’d never wanted to try. This Brian has an open shirt over a bony chest and hair that reaches down his mid-back. His blood-shot eyes never truly focus on anything. He smells like Freddie does, somedays, and Brian hates it.

He sits in the corridor between Brian’s bathroom and his bedroom, and Brian steps carefully over those long legs and holds his breath. 

 

* * *

 

Roger keeps his eyes covered with his enormous collection of sunglasses and Brian wants to rip them off. Wants to grab him and shake him because he knows Roger is as angry as he is and yet he sings along with Freddie and sits behind his drums like he hasn’t been replaced by a drum machine. Roger’s voice is loud and piercing but never the loudest; he never throws the first glass but he never leaves first either.

Brian leaves, like the coward he is, and stands outside the studio in the sticky air, half-wishing he smoked if only to give him something to do with his hands. No one ever follows him.

In one universe, he did pick up smoking, and that Brian stands beside him, face hidden and smoke curling through his hair. He wants to edge away, but something tells him the other Brian would just follow. He gives up instead. 

He’s been doing that a lot lately.

 

* * *

 

682 worlds of Queen and they break up in 246 of them. Brian wonders if this one will be 247. He records a solo and knows, the way you know a rainstorm is coming, that it won’t be on the final track. His stomach swoops with the feeling of freefalling and he tries to calculate the distance to the ground. There are too many variables; Roger’s tense moodiness and John’s ruthless apathy and Freddie’s casual disregard and his own bitter despair, multiplied by self-destructive habits and the public’s reaction. Carry the four, add one dark presence over a shoulder, and what do you get?

He knows this all began long before Hot Space, but Brian’s miserable mind needs something to latch onto and blame, and the album is a simple answer. 

All the other Brians watch emotionlessly when the hate rises up one night, all at once, like bile in his throat and he throws the plate he was listlessly washing into the wall. It shatters and he feels something inside him shatter too. Then he’s on the floor in a heap, awkward limbs wrapped around himself like the hugs he used to get from his bandmates. The sobs come up a bit easier. His ghosts just crowd around him and stare.

 

* * *

 

Brian doesn’t cry after that. He’s too tired, insomnia sitting heavy on his chest, keeping him in bed well into the afternoon on days he doesn’t have to go into the studio. 

The raw hurt has dulled to a bitter, constant ache. His ghosts gather by his bed like he’s a dying man, except their faces are blank and no one cries anymore.

 

* * *

 

Brian is starting to feel numb. It scared him at first, cold creeping up his legs; he’d always cared too much, it was one of those things about him people both loved and despised. But as the numbness has crept up to his heart, he finds it hard to worry about much of anything.

This might be world 247 and Brian feels a twinge of nauseous relief at the thought that he can’t bring himself to be guilty for.

Freddie stumbles into the studio, four hours late and completely plastered, and there’s only a small breath of disappointment. Brian sits in the recording booth, pressed between two ghosts and just as useless, and considers not showing up at all. He listens to Paul ask Freddie _do they really need guitar part for this part?_ and knows they wouldn’t miss him.

_What kind of disco has an electric guitar anyways?_ he thinks as John’s bass reverberates through his chest. There’s a Brian stood next to John who had gotten a bass guitar from his parents at sixteen instead of building an electric one, and he strums boredly along with the beat. Even in a world where he plays bass, Brian has taste.

 

* * *

 

In one universe, Brian loses his arm. The gangrene that had infected his hepatitis-ridden body spread too quickly, or maybe they were too slow to stop it. This Brian hides himself away in the unused rooms of his too large house, shying away from his eyes. Shame is an ugly patchwork of scars on the stump where his arm once was. His clothes are baggy in a way that suggests a bony, too-thin body underneath and his hair is a mess. Under his red-rimmed eyes are smears of discolored skin. Brian doesn’t know what happened to him after the procedure, doesn’t want to know. That Brian scares him.

He avoids that Brian and gets avoided in return. 

 

* * *

 

He and Freddie record Las Palabras de Amor together and for the first time in a while Brian feels something like hope. They’re still Queen, despite it all, and they exist to make music together, all different kinds from four different people who collided in 682 worlds and shook each one up.

The other Brians brush against him as he keeps his head up and shoulders forward in the hallways. Their eyes are as cold as always, ever watching. Brian can believe, for a moment, that it doesn’t matter. He has his band and maybe they’re not quite the family they once were but they’re something; bonds like theirs don’t just disappear. They know each other too well not to love each other. 

 

* * *

 

They know each other too well not to hate each other.

 

* * *

 

Roger’s the one to show up late this time, drunk- though, really, any one of them being drunk at the studio stopped being a rare occurrence months ago- and screams at Freddie and screams at everyone else. He trashes his drum kit and goes for John’s bass. Brian puts himself between Roger and his Red Special, thought he finds he hadn’t need to worry.

“You don’t even need me! You have that fucking drum machine!” he roars at John. Freddie says something placating and empty and Roger whips around like an enraged bull. Later, Brian sits with Roger in a bustling pub. The anonymity would be refreshing except Brian’s been feeling like no one recognizes him anymore, and maybe he’s not as numb as he thought.

Still, it’s hard to find pity as Roger throws back drink after drink. Brian watches his throat bob and traces the wrinkles on his sullen yet attractive face that weren’t there before.

In some universes, he and Roger got drunk and got off together, back in college. In some universes, it lasted into something more. In this universe, all Brian has bits of what could be drunken memories or drunken dreams- not that it matters anyways. Neither of them are gay, that’s Freddie’s thing- and maybe that’s part of the whole mess, isn’t it? Because Brian knows exactly where Hot Space is going to played; not in a generic pub like this one but a gay club, like the ones in Munich Freddie loves so much.

Freddie’s not playing to everyone in the room anymore. He’s playing to the people like him, and maybe it’s a good thing- what the world needs, maybe- but Queen isn’t just Freddie Mercury, despite what the public may like to think. 

Brian goes home to his empty house full of ghosts and tries to ignore the way their eyes look pitying in the dim kitchen light. There’s a rip in the wallpaper from his breakdown and a note from Chrissie on the dining table about the kids that he ignores as well. Ignores all the signs of things being wrong because if he adds them up he’d break down again and it’s so much easier to let himself trudge on in ignorance. It feels safer, and the weight that comes with it is manageable compared to the weight of his body pressed down by the invisible weight of depression. 

 

* * *

 

At some point, Brian gets used to the cold eyes watching him. When Freddie glares at him, red hot anger, Brian doesn’t even flinch. 

He’s supposed to be numb now, anyway.

 

* * *

 

Brian’s been thinking about alternate universes lately. It’s become his own form of escapism. It’s not healthy, really, but Roger chain-smokes and drinks and fucks and Freddie parties and fucks and does hard drugs and John drinks and compartmentalizes so severely that Brian’s not sure he feels things anymore, so maybe he isn’t doing too bad.

He thinks about those 1,034 universes and those 1,034 Brians, and wonders about all the universes where he’s already dead. Where there is no ghost for him because he’s long gone. It’s a bit morbid but Brian’s band is crumbling from the inside out so he indulges himself.

How many worlds did he die as a child? Children die so easily; they drown and get lost and get careless because they’re children and so fragile. Maybe in some worlds he gets sick. Maybe in some worlds he dies of hepatitis in back in ‘75 or maybe he dies of the gangrene. Maybe he’d rather die than live without an arm, than lose his guitar-playing and his band. _Not that it doesn’t happen anyway,_ he thinks, detached pity digging into his heart for those 246 maybe 247 worlds.

He thinks about car accidents- they’ve all had one, by now- and maybe there’s a world he died in one. He thinks about the others’ reactions. The shock, the horror, and overwhelming grief and anger and sorrow, and it hurts to think about but maybe a small part of him relishes in it. It’d be the first time they’d look like they cared in a while, and that thought makes it hurt more.

The numbness holds onto his skin, clings like wet paper, but underneath his skin is a desperate, burning despair. He’s in mourning. Mourning the loss of Queen before it even happens, if it even happens- _this isn’t world 247 yet_ \- but more importantly, he’s mourning the loss of his family. Queen was his family, at one time, and now-

And now. He doesn’t know what they are now. Not family, hardly friends, but they know each other too well to be strangers.

Brian thinks of afternoons on a tour bus playing scrabble in warm sunlight, and thinks of late mornings, already drunk under the cold artificial lights with vitriol flying across the studio. They got lost somewhere in the middle, between a tour and album, when everyone but Brian cut their hair and suddenly glam rock was childish and embarrassing.

He wishes they could find their way back, but standing in the studio with his guitar, little better than the rest of the furniture, Brian knows there’s no way back. Things will never be as they were before, and that realization breaks something in him he didn’t even know he still had.

His ghosts wander around the studio and he thinks this might just be their funeral.

 

* * *

 

In the beginning of the recording period, Brian pretends the elation of finishing a song is the same bright spark it always was, pretends it’s brighter than the dark dawning isolation as their music develops into something without him. Towards the end, he gives up pretending.

Lead guitarist is a nice title to have until the band stops needing it. John plays bass and rhythm and takes his place. Brian’s not quite sure if he does it on purpose or not, but it feels like swallowing acid when he stands off to one side, him and all his ghosts, watching John get praised by Freddie for having the same taste in music, as if that was an accomplishment.

Maybe he misses Freddie. Maybe he misses being needed, and liked, and _useful_. He knows, realistically, that he’s still contributing somewhat- he wrote Dancer, just for Freddie because that’s what Freddie wanted and Brian was bad at saying no to his friends- but it sure doesn’t feel like it, most days.

 

* * *

 

There’s a world where he and John fall in love. It’s a strange match, Brian thinks. John always liked Freddie and Roger more. They’d never quite connected. Except, apparently, when they did. It’s a quiet, simple thing.

In that world, they break up during this time. 

It gives Brian just one more reason to hate this album. 

 

* * *

 

Unsurprisingly, Hot Space doesn’t sell out. No one’s really sure how to feel about it- that’s a lie, some people definitely know how they feel about it and Brian’s at the top of that list.

And yet he’s there alongside the others, sitting in foldable chairs at foldable tables and fielding questions that have little to do with music at all. Freddie gets most of the questions, of course, and a lot of them are disgusting. Brian’s stomach curls at the audacity. Freddie brushes them off, sounding almost casual despite the poison dripping off every word. He’s been wearing sunglasses a lot more lately, except they aren’t prescription like Roger’s, not to help him but to hide him, hide away the red-rimmed eyes and the shadows underneath.

Freddie seems pleased, all the same. He probably hears their music in his new haunts, but Brian can safely say the rest of them haven’t been hearing their new stuff on any radio or in any bar.

The studio is swarming as they pack up, technicians and band members and Brian’s ghosts crowding him into a wall where he clutches his Red Special and feels, again, like they’re moving on without him. 

 

* * *

 

They go on tour, like they do. In one universe, Brian gets attacked onstage by a rabid fan and develops a fear of public performance. In another world, Brian collapses in front of the audience because his drink before the show had been spiked. In a third, Brian breaks a leg backstage and has to be carried out, consequently forcing the others to cancel the show. In this universe, he’s gone on blind drunk and he’s tripped and he’s played with a concussion and a bandage on his head.

The point is, bad things happen on tours. Out of 682 universes, he’s already stopped touring by now in 57 of them. Queen has a broken wing and Brian’s sure the ground is seconds away.

Freddie's in a more casual number as he belts into the microphone. Everything about him is different; his clothes are more athletic and less extravagant, his voice is lower when he sings, and his eyes are a different shape without the eyeliner. The more drastic difference, of course, is his hair; his jaw is wider without fluffy hair framing it and the veins in his neck stand out where they hadn’t before and the mustache covers up those teeth he’d always been insecure about. He looks like the men he surrounds himself with.

There’s a new energy to the way he controls the stage, but he controls it all the same and the people are hypnotized, just as before. Brian watches him strut, familiar in the way he holds the the half-mic to his hips and alien in the set of his shoulders, and thinks this Freddie is an easier pill for the public to swallow. He’s more overtly masculine now, which probably pleases the more conservative folks. Then again, he’s still flamboyant and dramatic and gay, under it all. He’s still _Freddie_. They love him and Brian loves him too, somewhere under all the hurt. 

In some universes, he and Freddie fall in love. In every universe they meet in, there’s a love there, deep and unspoken and not inherently romantic. Brian thinks he might have fallen in love with Freddie in this universe too- not necessarily love in the sense of marriage, but something- and maybe that’s why there’s an ever-constant ache in his chest now. Maybe that’s why he’s in freefall.

Brian walks off the stage, leaving behind the screaming cheers and into the embrace of his ghosts. They’ve followed him. His hotel room is empty and full and Brian can only sit in it for so long before he has to escape, disappearing into the city and getting lost among the people not wearing his face.

 

* * *

 

Brian’s been thinking about alternate universes lately. He’s counted 1,034 and pressed them into the folds of himself, steps carefully around the spectres that crowd him and never thinks too hard about why.

Queen’s broken wing has been set and it healed just a bit wonky. The bone has a bump to it where the splinters were forced together, and it’s visible from certain angles; John’s outspokenness and Freddie’s new friends and Roger’s refusal to acknowledge certain things and the way the others can see Brian’s eyes track shapes the don’t exist.

He wonders about ghosts and other worlds and whether this is the new status quo. The rift between them has shrunk but he can feel the gaps, all the same.

 

* * *

 

Brian doesn’t know it now, but in a few years they perform to the world and the world screams back and all at once, they’re a family again. He goes to the recording studio and things are still different- that knot in the bone is never going away- everyone’s hair is still short and their music doesn’t sound the same but this time the difference is he _likes_ it.

In a few years they’ll be a family again and the ghosts will disappear. Not completely; from time to time Brian will catch himself thinking and he’ll see a person in his peripheral vision that looks like him, but they won’t fill his house and his mind anymore.

In a few years, Queen will have survived and the number of worlds where they break up remains 246.

Brian doesn’t know that now. He doesn’t even think about it, can’t bear to cling to a hope that could pull apart like candy floss in his hands.

But things get better, they do. And then they’ll end, as all things do, but the bitterness will be long behind. A distant memory. As if it were from a different world.

**Author's Note:**

> hot space is an underwritten era. you can't change my mind


End file.
